The 'primary core processes of the personality' are the earliest and most significant experiences of the child with its mother; they are almost entirely immutable regardless of death or duration of analysis. 'This is the nonreducible residue.' The more closely one approaches those processes, the more difficult and dangerous is treatment: one deals with primary processes and an ego incapable of self-discrimination, reality testing, and synthesis. Here one passes beyond the goal of resolution of Oedipal and bisexual conflicts. If the weakening of defenses reaches a point at which the patient regresses to levels of organization unequipped to handle reality, shame over this inability can be a source of the greatest dangers,—suicide and psychosis. Shame over such failure to realize one's potential growth is apparently innate, or learned, or both.